Slightly contrarian, mildly annoying, somewhat influential mailbag

www.slowboring.com

Slightly contrarian, mildly annoying, somewhat influential mailbag

Matthew Yglesias

20 - 25 minutes

I was profiled in the Washington Post, and you might find the piece interesting.

Some nice stories! Brian Kemp is pushing housing reform in Georgia (which is also getting a huge new investment in solar panel manufacturing), while Kathy Hochul outlines a bunch of ambitious and specific YIMBY proposals for New York. There’s a housebuilding boom in New Zealand thanks to Jacinda Ardern’s ambitious land use reforms.

Elsewhere, a bunch of state-level Republicans have acted to clip the wings of far-right members of their legislative caucuses. The economic success of Malaysia, based on foreign direct investment and not involving any particular sweetheart trade deals, makes me more optimistic about the growth prospects of other mid-sized countries. They ended an Ebola outbreak in Uganda.

Forward!

City of Trees: This week marks the 52nd mailbag! Any thoughts on what running them for a week has helped with for the site and for your writing?

They’ve been fun to do, they’ve given me a little more space to work on longer-form pieces, and the questions often inspire full columns, so I think the experiment has been a big success. I’m also always glad to have a way to generate some extra value for members that isn’t just walling more and more text off from the world, so I like having something that at least some people seem to enjoy participating in that works as a member exclusive.

That said, I do sometimes worry that the exercise may be becoming too repetitive, so this week I’m going to try offering longer answers to a smaller number of questions and see how that suits. We’ll still mix in some very short stuff, but there are basically fewer tweener answers.

TPM: I was delighted to read that you are going to attend a classical music concert. What are you going to hear at the National Symphony? And if you've already been, what did you think of it? Will you go back?

Kate (who has much more symphony experience than I do) and I are going to see Dvořák’s 7th in a few weeks, largely because that’s what’s playing when my dad will be in town to babysit.

JA: This is going to be a slightly trollish question. I love this substack, and I learn a lot from it. However, I worry that I suffer from some Gell-Mann amnesia when reading it.

I'm an economist, and I've found that a lot of your opinions on economic issues (especially monetary policy) are laid out with great confidence and yet very little knowledge beyond an intermediate undergraduate level. The most ridiculous offender was the article in which you proclaimed the optimality of nominal GDP targeting, despite the fact that you're probably not familiar enough with modern macro theory to articulate what the main counterarguments are. (Instead, it seems like this was just an idea that you got from Scott Sumner's blog...)

Are your hot takes in other areas (e.g. politics, housing policy, transportation policy) grounded on more expertise, or are they like your economics takes?

Gell-Mann Amnesia is the phenomenon where when you read a journalistic account of something you are truly an expert in, you realize that the treatment has all kinds of flaws. But then when you are reading about something you are not an expert in, you forget how bad the coverage of your specialty was and just assume it’s good. This is a real thing that happens to me every time I read about myself.

But I really don’t love this complaint about media (or about myself), and I think this question really illustrates why. Here we have a person with a PhD in economics complaining that my economics articles seem to reflect merely an “intermediate undergraduate level” of monetary policy. I fully accept that as a criticism and would not expect a person with an economics PhD to learn anything useful or interesting about economics from my columns. At the same time, a large majority of the population — including me — does not have an intermediate undergraduate-level education in economics. And most economics professors are neither willing nor able to write engaging and timely columns about national affairs. So I think that even according to this critical account of my work, I am raising the level of discourse with my monetary policy columns. And that is also the standard I try to set with my housing, transportation, and congressional politics takes. This is an unabashedly generalist site, and I both hope and assume that anyone curious about even deeper dives on these subjects will be able to pursue more specialist sources if that’s what they want.

To the specific charge that NGDP targeting is just an idea I got from Scott Sumner’s blog, I both plead guilty (that’s where I got it from), but also think this sort of illustrates the opposite of your point.

Sumner, after all, is a PhD-haver and college professor who specializes in monetary economics, so if the idea is that it’s important to be more deferential to experts, then where else should I get ideas from? On the other hand, lots of well-qualified PhD-havers and monetary economists disagree with him. This just shows that, unfortunately, macroeconomics is not the kind of subject where you see a convergence of policy opinions as people become more and more expert.

But it’s not like Sumner is alone on NGDP Targeting Island, and I just picked up an idea from a random blogger. Christina Romer has advocated for NGDP targeting. So has Michael Woodford. If you want to get your economics takes from a columnist who has a Nobel Prize in economics, Paul Krugman has advocated for NGDP targeting.

Now of course none of that is to say that there is a clear academic consensus in favor of NGDP targeting. Far from it. And if you ever catch me saying something like “a large majority of macroeconomists favor NGDP targeting” or something like that, then that would be crazy. I haven’t done a formal survey or anything, but my sense is that this is a very controversial idea among academics, and the fact that you don’t see any of the world’s central banks adopting an NGDP-level target speaks for itself to some extent. Something that happens from time to time is that I make mistakes — Wednesday’s post, for example, just did some bond math wrong in a way that someone more experienced in writing about bond markets wouldn’t have done. I was reaching into new subject matter and I made a mistake. It’s not a mistake I will make again, and more to the point, it’s not a mistake I would have made if I’d been better versed in bonds. But even if you think my monetary policy takes are bad, I don’t think you can explain the disagreement by saying “hey, this guy hasn’t gone to grad school.” Woodford and Romer and Krugman and Sumner and David Beckworth have all gone to grad school. People just disagree!

Romulus Augustus: You are a Dune fanatic. What is your main argument for not being an Asimov “Foundation” stan?

I like the Foundation books, but I think they really show their age in a way that Dune doesn’t.

Scottie J: You and Noah Smith often chide progressives for accusing those they disagree with of operating in bad faith. I am broadly sympathetic to your perspective on this, but I am curious as to how you define bad faith. Over the weekend you chimed in on a Twitter back and forth between Jonathan Chait and Shadi Hamid. You mentioned that you find Hamid's tweets "extremely annoying." Hamid seems like a pretty clear example of someone that often tweets in bad faith. He's trying to antagonize progressives and mock their concerns without trying to actually persuade anyone of anything. Am I completely off-base on this?

I like this question because I think it’s a good illustration of how I think about this — I sincerely have no idea whether or not Shadi Hamid tweets “in bad faith” because I am not a major consumer of Shadi Hamid’s tweets. What I have seen of his Twitter presence strikes me as pretty annoying, so I don’t follow him.

That being said, I’ve also been broadly familiar with his work on American foreign policy and democracy promotion in the Middle East going back to before Twitter existed. I’ve never found his arguments about this to be 100 percent convincing, but they’re not zero percent convincing either. This article he wrote last month connecting the dots between the Ukraine war and the lack of democracy in the Middle East is very interesting, for example. And I liked his 2014 book, “Temptations of Power: Islamists and Illiberal Democracy in a New Middle East” a lot. Since I’m actually more familiar with his longer-form work in this area than I am with his tweets needling liberals, I think I also end up with a somewhat different sense of where it is that he’s coming from.

One of the big issues in U.S. policy toward the Middle East is that there’s a persistent concern that if Middle Eastern regimes become more responsive to public opinion, the voters might make “bad” choices about policy.

Suppose a democratic Egypt were to tear up the country’s longstanding peace deal with Israel. A democratic UAE would maybe do the same thing. Democratic regimes might want to flex their nationalist credentials by kicking out American bases or conditioning intelligence cooperation with the CIA on America making some kind of policy concessions. Maybe from a left perspective, those are easy to give up on for the sake of democracy. But it gets worse. What if a more democratic Middle East means restrictions of rights for women and LGBT people? What if it means less tolerance for religious minorities? The tensions between democracy and liberalism aren’t new ideas to political theory, but the tensions can be particularly acute when we’re thinking about places where the median of public opinion is very distant from what’s considered a liberal ideal in the contemporary United States.

Hamid’s professional work involves a lot of grappling with these kinds of questions, and I suspect part of his annoyance with the Trump-era (and especially post-1/6) progressive discourse about democracy is that it strikes a specialist in this area as kind of shallow.

My friend Erica De Bruin is a political scientist who studies coups. She also used to work in the D.C. policy world. So when Trump/coup stuff got in the discourse after Election Day 2020, I was curious about her take and was glad The Washington Post published a piece from her. But her conclusion was that “coup” was the wrong shorthand for what was happening. Suffice it to say, the reaction from the peanut gallery to this was not kind, largely because people had already converged on the idea that the thing to say if you wanted to strongly condemn his election subversion efforts was to accuse him of attempting a “coup.” Nobody was interested in someone injecting persnickety disagreements, even if the someone in question is literally a coup scholar. She, I think, understandably chose to not spend the subsequent several months fighting on the internet with people about this and is instead publishing good, popular press pieces about things like coups in Africa.

But the point of this digression is that I think it’s actually not unusual for people who’ve studied foreign countries to find the #resistance discourse on the subject of American democracy to be a bit off. The difference is Hamid likes to needle people on Twitter about this.

Now as I say, I am not personally a huge fan of these tweets. But my guess is that they are offered in supremely good faith — that most people don’t realize they’re coming truly and deeply from the heart of someone who was thinking about the dilemmas of democracy promotion long before Trump came onto the scene and who’ll still be working on that topic when the discourse moves on to something else. But a lot of people don’t seem to want to just shrug and not follow people whose tweets they don’t enjoy. They instead want to come up with Big Reasons why the person is Officially Bad and they often reach for this “bad faith” idea to explain it. But I think it’s worth being shallower. Tastes differ and you can just not follow someone.

I’m going to close this out with something I can screenshot and that will surely annoy people on Twitter: I’m struck again and again by the fact that the Trump-era anxiety about American democracy among liberals has been paired with an increasing discomfort at the idea of subjecting institutions to democratic governance. Whether we’re talking about Covid NPIs or K-12 curriculum or content moderation rules, I think liberals are increasingly inclined to argue in favor of the importance of deference to credentialed experts — in part because, not coincidentally, education polarization means credentialed experts are likely to be liberals. I think Hamid is a bit under-alarmed about the procedural radicalism of the modern right. But a big theme of Slow Boring is that the fight to preserve democracy needs to include more willingness to pander to the actually existing views of the public and a bit less cultural avant-gardism. Just as a democratic future for Egypt would almost certainly entail more Islamist influence over policy than I personally would favor — after all, I’m a secular Jew — a democratic future for the United States of America entails an education system that inculcates values closer to those of the median voter than to those of the median working-age college graduate.

Justin P: You said towards the end of a “Bad Takes” episode about your bariatric surgery that you'd stopped losing weight and started gaining it. That strikes me as an astonishing admission about the effectiveness of a surgery that's going to mean lifelong changes for the kinds of foods you're able to comfortably eat. If the “environmental obesogens” hypothesis turns out to be true (there's a fair bit of evidence that it is) then has doctors pushing bariatric surgery to such an extent been a mistake?

I would just really dispute the premise that doctors are heavily pushing bariatric surgery. There are tons of people with obesity in the United States and only a tiny fraction of them seek surgical treatment for it.

Stepping back, the basic facts are:

    I weighed nearly 280 pounds before my surgery.

    About nine months post-surgery I bottomed out at around 215 pounds.

    By one year post-surgery I’d rebounded to 225 and then stabilized there for a few months.

    I gained five pounds during the Thanksgiving-Christmas era, so then for a New Year’s Resolution, I had to recommit to a healthy lifestyle and swiftly lost back those five holiday pounds on ten days of a 16:8 intermittent fasting protocol.

    I’m now sticking with the 16:8, and we’ll see where that takes me. 

I think those are pretty good results, though your mileage may vary. Beyond that, I’m interested in environmental obesogens and other hypotheses people have. But one point I would make is that the discourse needs to try harder to distinguish between the question of weight loss for people with obesity, which is very important for a lot of us in the contemporary United States, and the question of obesity prevention in future generations. The latter is really the win we want. No matter how bullish you may be about Ozempic or bariatric surgery, we know that “everyone gets fat and then gets surgery and medication to lose weight” is not an optimal solution.

And importantly, if we look at past eras with a much lower prevalence of obesity, we know that even back then people who were overweight really struggled to lose the pounds. The difference is that drastically fewer people were becoming overweight in the first place. So the question of how we get back to that kind of situation is important. But I do think the evidence suggests that overweight people can’t just copy what they see non-overweight people doing and expect to see the same results any more than you can tell alcoholics to copy the behavior of casual drinkers.

Ken Bowers: Back on December 27 writing about housing, you wrote: “The real policy challenge is developing a proposal that will reassure people who park their car on the street and who worry that more housing will lead to more parking scarcity.” That rings true, but I don't think there is an honest way around the fact that if you remove parking requirements and allow more density, curb parking will likely become more scarce. Yes, you can solve this with pricing, but I don't think that's what the incumbent residents have in mind. Setting aside whether easy curb parking should trump housing, have you seen any such proposals that you think are political winners?

To be clear, the reason I advocate for more focus on this is precisely because it’s not obvious what the solution is. Unlike the zany ideological anti-YIMBY arguments that take up a lot of time on housing Twitter, “if more people live near me that will increase competition for parking spaces” is broadly accurate.

Part of the solution is adopting the right political approach. It’s very unusual for a policy change to have zero downsides for everyone. The case for something like the ADU reforms that California has adopted in recent years is that all things considered, the benefits outweigh the costs. And part of how they assembled the coalition for that was a discussion in Sacramento about statewide policy change. This works because the benefits of abundant housing are broader than the costs of parking scarcity. So if you ask someone “would you rather have more housing in your neighborhood?” the answer may be “no.” But if you ask them “would you rather have more housing in every in-demand neighborhood?” that flips to a “yes.”

There are also more down-and-dirty ways to do coalition politics. Part of the land use reform that Kathy Hochul is proposing is to require upzoning near New York State’s commuter rail stations. I doubt she will be able to persuade many state legislators from Long Island and Westchester to embrace this. The hope is that a coalition of New York City Democrats plus a bipartisan coalition of members from upstate and western New York will just outvote them. The proposed change is clearly better for most of the people in the state and sometimes that’s how small-d democratic politics works — you forge a coalition and you beat the opposition. The key to making this work, though, is that you have to frame it to rural Republicans and Democrats from Buffalo and Rochester as a kind of boring technical issue that’s good for the state’s economy and tax base. What you don’t want to do is run around talking about how everyone on Long Island is being racist, because that will negatively polarize upstate Republicans into supporting the putatively racist Long Island NIMBYs.

The basic logic of “stay chill, build coalitions, and outvote the opposition” is in general just a bit underrated on the east coast.

One of the most ridiculous things, for example, is that New York City has not yet abolished regulatory parking minimums. The winning argument in this particular case is that especially outside of Staten Island, most New Yorkers do not own cars, so you have regulations that are bad for the economy, bad for the environment, bad for freedom, and bad for poor people that have no upside at all for a majority of the city’s households. You just need to acknowledge that the motivating concern here is a practical one about parking.

To get more specific, you need to delve into the details of the local situation, so I’ll talk about the place I am most familiar with: Washington, D.C.

D.C. is interesting in that daily car commuters are a minority of the city’s adults, but over 60 percent of households do own cars. Those cars need to be parked somewhere, and a lot of people park them on the street permanently while another big swathe do so at least occasionally. Some of the city’s parking is metered and some of it is wide open, but much of it is governed by neighborhood-based Residential Parking Permits. These RPPs are very cheap, and a reasonable concern RPP holders have is that more residents in their area will increase the number of RPP holders without increasing the number of RPP spaces. Things like bike lanes also drive concern about the reduction in the utility of RPPs. And of course, relaxing the city’s regulatory parking minimums would result in more scarcity of RPPs.

For a long time, high-minded urbanists have been pushing the city to raise the price of RPPs. That’s an idea that makes sense to me in the abstract, but I don’t think it’s proven to be a winner, and my current thinking is that the best path forward is to do the opposite of this — give every current RPP holder a permanent, free Residential Parking Permit and then stop issuing new ones.

Where will new residents park? Well, we should turn the RPPs into property that you can sell or transfer to other people. So if a new person comes to town, he either needs to park off-street or else he needs to get by without a car — which a huge minority of the city’s current households already do. This creates a situation in which scarcity of parking has financial upside for incumbent residents by increasing the value of your RPP. In this world, while there is still plenty of new construction that has off-street parking, the political economy switches away from requiring off-street parking. And while today my neighbors might say they are glad that it’s illegal for me to turn my garage into an ADU, in a world where parking scarcity creates financial upside for them, they might welcome this.